Preface: I am very pleased that FFG decided to develop 2e, plus I am happy with the results of their work.

That said...I’ve been pouring over spoiled materials for a while now and I think whenever FFG looks at their next card update (whether or not it goes with a game revision), I think more icon use would be a good thing.

FFG uses icons now. The focus icon supplants the word “focus.” However, why not have variants of that icon used to supplant “focus result on a die roll,” “perform a focus action,”or “gain a focus token,” and so on. The variants can be differentiated by color or other signifiers like a circle or underline.

The same idea can be used for trigger phrasing that gets used again and again. For instance, “after you perform this attack” could be supplanted with a stylized capital “A” while “after you perform this attack and it hit the target” could be represented by a circled version of that icon.

Basically, if a given chunk of text will be used again and again to represent an effect or the timing of effects, it could be replaced with an icon. Something like this will be a little daunting for new players, but it will compel more consistency in the cards and uniformity among players’s understanding of the cards. I will let the semioticians figure out what would be best for the icons themselves. ?

Too many icons can prove confusing. Using icons for obvious things like die results or token icons is fine but when you start using icons for things that dont directly correlate to a physical object people get confused.

Look at the turret arc icon. People are confused as **** about that one in relation to their normal firing arcs. Theyre different, but just looking at the icon its kinda hard to know that.

I'd rather not have X-wing cards turn into the typical space instructions for a Euro worker placement game, where I have to reference the manual to have any hope of a clue what a given thing actually does.

35 minutes ago, Otacon said:

I'd rather not have X-wing cards turn into the typical space instructions for a Euro worker placement game , where I have to reference the manual to have any hope of a clue what a given thing actually does.

Wait, now you're onto something.

Let IKEA write all the cards. No words, EVER!!

1 hour ago, Darth Meanie said:

Wait, now you're onto something.

Let IKEA write all the cards. No words, EVER!!

Can we grunt and point while explaining it to new people? I’m down.

?

On 8/17/2018 at 11:04 AM, Pewpewpew BOOM said:

Preface: I am very pleased that FFG decided to develop 2e, plus I am happy with the results of their work.

That said...I’ve been pouring over spoiled materials for a while now and I think whenever FFG looks at their next card update (whether or not it goes with a game revision), I think more icon use would be a good thing.

FFG uses icons now. The focus icon supplants the word “focus.” However, why not have variants of that icon used to supplant “focus result on a die roll,” “perform a focus action,”or “gain a focus token,” and so on. The variants can be differentiated by color or other signifiers like a circle or underline.

The same idea can be used for trigger phrasing that gets used again and again. For instance, “after you perform this attack” could be supplanted with a stylized capital “A” while “after you perform this attack and it hit the target” could be represented by a circled version of that icon.

Basically, if a given chunk of text will be used again and again to represent an effect or the timing of effects, it could be replaced with an icon. Something like this will be a little daunting for new players, but it will compel more consistency in the cards and uniformity among players’s understanding of the cards. I will let the semioticians figure out what would be best for the icons themselves. ?

Good lord No.

Words are used to convey information, they are the most direct way to do it. People should not need to learn dozens of strange and unneccessary symbols or use a decoder ring to read cards

This is a horrible idea

7 hours ago, Vontoothskie said:

Good lord No.

Words are used to convey information, they are the most direct way to do it. People should not need to learn dozens of strange and unneccessary symbols or use a decoder ring to read cards

This is a horrible idea

Folks who responded here expressed that more icons would complicate the game. When I look at what can currently make things murky, one things jump out: inconsistent wording. Having one way of clearly expressing a given result or the timing of effects eliminates that. Using an icon with single defined meaning is one way (among many) to do it.

Pictures and shapes are used to convey info all over the place and people are accostomed to taking in that info without thinking about it. Drive or walk around a public place and you will notice plenty. Icons become a problem when they are used for fringe cases so folks don’t use them enough to immediately know the meaning. It takes a few round of playing X-Wing to recall what the focus icon represents, but once that is set in one’s head, there are no issues.

More icons is rough path. You have very little wiggle room between "good way to relay information quickly" and "cluttered mess". Here's an example from Warmachine:

On the far right, you can see Eiryss2's MK1 card. As you can see, there are no icons at all, just a wall of text both at the bottom and on the back. I couldn't find a reference photo of the back, but there was a small novella of text back there, much of which was just redundant i.e. repeating what abilities that everyone is familiar with do, like Assault and Weapon Master.

Here is the mark 2 card, a little small, but if you look under the main statline you can see a number a round icons for things like Stealth, Pathfinder and Advanced Deployment. This greatly simplified things as all of these rules were universal and allowed you to only print one version of the rule and just put a keyword or icon on the card, so you wouldn't have to worry about language inconsistencies across versions.

This is her Mark 3 card and it's frankly a mess. There are no fewer than 8 separate icons, all of which have at least a sentence in the rulebook, if not whole paragraphs for things like Assault. This is where you're really across the proverbial line because you can't read the card and know what she does. You have to have a rulebook, opened to multiple sections, in order to begin to get an idea and if you need to reference something specific, you're back to the core rulebook again. It's a very slow and tedious process and further hindered by a number of very similar icons. Is it an Arrow pointing right? That's Advanced Deploy. Is the arrowing pointing right and up with a mini explosion? That's Assault. Are there sparkles? Well yes, there's sparkles by themselves and around a weapon. One of those Means it's a Magic Weapon and one of those means the Weapon is Blessed (and it's probably the opposite of what you think it is).

More icons help to a point, but you always have to be careful about going overboard. Nobody wants to be flipping through a rulebook every other turn just to see what differentiates the eyeball icon from the slightly different eyeball icon.

9 hours ago, Pewpewpew BOOM said:

Folks who responded here expressed that more icons would complicate the game. When I look at what can currently make things murky, one things jump out: inconsistent wording. Having one way of clearly expressing a given result or the timing of effects eliminates that. Using an icon with single defined meaning is one way (among many) to do it.

Pictures and shapes are used to convey info all over the place and people are accostomed to taking in that info without thinking about it. Drive or walk around a public place and you will notice plenty. Icons become a problem when they are used for fringe cases so folks don’t use them enough to immediately know the meaning. It takes a few round of playing X-Wing to recall what the focus icon represents, but once that is set in one’s head, there are no issues.

Correction: There are no issues FOR YOU PERSONALLY.

You're entitled to your opinion, but so is everyone else, and speaking for myself I think you're dead wrong. symbols are harder to learn and discern when there are more of them, as evidenced by pictoral alphabets.

The rules people are unclear on are unique ones anyway, so how would that work? every ace gets there own symbol which you have to then look up the meaning of? It adds nothing but complication

10 hours ago, MasterShake2 said:

Mage Hunter Solo? So she's like Han's sister, or something? Man, the new canon is confusing.